Cindy Loper

My weirdness as a child (and adult) would come full circle. But let me back up a little and describe just how very weird I was. Imagine a scrawny little blonde girl with gappy teeth and roller skates and you’ll have it pictured pretty well. Add in a compulsive need to lick the ends of her fingers because her skin just felt too weird without moisture. Throw in an obsessive need to play music constantly and a fascination with crimping Barbie’s hair. Let’s not even talk about what else Barbie did. What happens to Barbie in East Texas stays in East Texas.

So, you’ve created this mental picture of me, right? Now consider that I had a heavy lisp, a Texas accent, a torrid love affair with climbing trees, dirt on my person almost constantly, a small purple radio close by at all times, sometimes a fishing pole in hand, other times a tail-less lizard, always reading a book or typing a story or drawing cartoons. And for many years, a very frizzy perm. Sometimes purple lipstick when I was feeling really punk.

Now imagine my clothes. Never fitting my tall, gangly frame, mismatched (but stylin’ in my head). And more often than not, dealing with inappropriate laughter at inappropriate times. I actually did get sent to the principal’s office once because the teacher couldn’t get me to stop laughing. And even after all that, I had no clue how weird I was until much later when I started listening to asshole kids that made fun of me.

In the third grade our class decided to do a skit of We Are the World. We all got assigned a celebrity singer and wonder of wonders, I was given my hero and idol, Cyndi Lauper. I’m not entirely sure when I started crushing on her so bad, but I had She’s So Unusual on cassette tape and wore the living fuck out of that thing in my walkman. Then I got her new record for my birthday one year and memorized every lyric, beat, and outfit on the cover, inside and out.

I studied this woman like no other. Somewhere in my wild little heart, I sensed a kindred. I drooled over her multicolored hair, wishing for such expression. I tried so hard to get my hair to be cool like that, but after a bus ride to school, it just looked like I’d had some wild times on the planet Ah-Ah. Where no one is cool. No one. Plus, we had to actually rent a VCR whenever I had slumber parties, so hair color most likely was not going to happen for my child self.

Back to We Are the World, a.k.a. the best thing that ever happened to the third grade. I went home and made feverish plans, like I do to this day when I am obsessed, and got all my shit prepped to hopefully do major justice to my role as Cyndi: the queen of weird. I was sure the teacher had chosen this for me because deep down, she knew...I mean, KNEW, that Cyndi and I were the same. It gave me hope. We are the fucking world kind of hope.

The day came. I dressed in the clothes I had scraped together at home to best represent my idol and strutted into school like a boss, all arms and knobby knees and zest. The class was a flurry of excitement as a bunch of eight year olds pretended to be Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and all those guys. I kinda feel bad for whoever had to be Kenny Rogers. Have you seen that guy’s arms? I don’t even remember my classmates all that well because I was mostly only interested in my role in all this. Obviously.

My teacher was furiously writing the name tags for each kid just in case you couldn’t tell who those other schmoes were pretending to be. I scoffed at this since the other classes watching our show would no doubt know I was Cyndi. She handed me my name tag.

It said, “Cindy Loper.”

I stood there frozen. How. Fucking. Dare. She.

Cindy Loper?? That had to be The Most Basic thing I’d ever read. I was mortified. And yeah, I tried to tell her, “look bitch. this is not how you spell the name of the most important woman of our time,” but she was having none of it. I looked around at the other kids. No one else was misspelled. The horror.

We did the show. Everyone else looking fly as hell and me, gangly and awkward, trying so hard to emulate my hero, but with Cindy Loper taped to my front. I’m pretty sure I rocked so hard anyway because what else can you do when your third grade teacher is a dumb ass?

I tried Cyndi. Really I did.

My weirdness continued and morphed, despite my attempts to hide it from the world later. Among my eccentricities, I started having vivid dreams and hallucinations at night. I told my mom, but she didn’t seem concerned that Satan had started pinning me to the bed at night. Or that I occasionally stole her cigarette butts to see what smoking was like. Or my penchant for peach schnapps at the house I babysat, but I didn’t tell her those last two things, so she’s off the hook for now. She also didn’t know about the 4x4 piece of cardboard that I copied the entire astrology section from our encyclopedias and hid behind my bed. Sorry for being such a pagan, Mom.

It became my normal to wake up at night and see a dude sitting on the edge of my bed. Or have dreams that I was going to change the world with the color yellow while standing on a rainbow encirclement surrounded by storms and a bodiless voice. Doesn’t every seventeen year old?

As I got older, the hallucinations or visions happened during daytime naps as well. Shit like my toddler, who was very much gated in his room, suddenly walking on top of my dresser while I lay there frozen, unable to move. Completely normal.

Or what about the time I looked over at my newborn sleeping next to me and saw little red lights floating under his skin? The dreams were just as vivid and sometimes I couldn’t shake them for a whole day. Or longer. Flying was my favorite. So many dreams where I flew here and there in other worlds my subconscious created. Every night was like another lifetime.

Then, as if all that weren’t weird enough, life decided, “Hey. Let’s level up, bitches.”

And my dreams took on an even more heightened state. I started dreaming of people and would meet them the next day. Or places I’d never been to and seeing them exactly as in the dream. Nighttime visions of a dark man at the end of my bed while I yelled NO at him. Looking into the bathroom doorway next to my bed and seeing a Hindu temple being formed. Or a koi fish flying through my window. Or a string of me’s dressed in blue hospital gowns, each holding onto the other’s feet, flying out that same window.

Or the multicolored bridge made of twisted metal. That was beautiful and strange. All while I was in between wakefulness and sleep. These are just the highlights.

And then one night, I had a very special dream. It wasn’t really a dream as much as it was a flash in the middle of some other dreams. Out of place, but clear as day.

An ostrich with a woman’s body. And sassy as fuck.

I woke up and just kind of said, “huh.”

A few days later I drew her. She just came out on my sketchpad all willy nilly and when she did, I laughed my ass off. Her name was Myrtle. I knew in that moment that she was the embodiment of all my weirdness and awkwardness and that somehow she had made it into a fucking superpower.

But she has her own story to tell.